In a classroom in Ontario, a class of 9th graders learned the book Siddhartha, not by listening to lectures from their teacher, but by asking questions like, “How do you know when you’ve reached enlightenment?” Meanwhile, a group of 3rd through 5th graders in rural Georgia was posed a question in Spanish, even though they speak English: “Why doesn’t everyone in the world speak the same language?” And hundreds of miles away in New Hampshire, a group of 7th graders pondered, “Will the human race ever go extinct?” with only one rule: you may not look up the answer in a book.

All of these students had one thing in common: [ted_talkteaser id=1678]their teachers watched the talk from this year’s TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra, challenging them to reinvent the way kids learn. Mitra pioneered the “Hole in the Wall” experiments in the 1990s, which showed that — given…